There’s a saying in mine country, the kind that sometimes shows up on bumper stickers: “If it can’t be grown, it has to be mined.” Before mining can ever start, though, there has to be ore in the ...

The past few months, we’ve been giving you a quick rundown of the various ways ores form underground; now the time has come to bring that surface-level understanding to surface-level processes.

Ore deposits are scarce. Their discovery consumes considerable time and resources and only about one in every thousand prospects explored by companies is eventually developed into a mine. Deposits ...

Amid Earth’s mobile tectonic plates, subduction zones arise as regions of intense geological activity. These zones create processes that concentrate minerals into ore deposits. High-temperature, water ...

Humic acid (HA) is a macromolecular organic substance which is widely used in agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, chemical industry, building materials, medicine, environmental protection, and a ...

Their study shows that a unique "dense liquid layer" at the interface between pyrite and water acts as a "nano-factory," promoting the nucleation, growth and enrichment of gold even in fluids with ...